The image of the burning towers was the first thing on television when I woke up on September 11, 2001. Being nine years old at the time, I didn’t fully understand the significance of the event; I knew it was an attack on a famous building, and I knew that it was bad, but I also knew that a lot of bad things happened on the news. What made this event so special? It seemed to my naive nine year old self that all the adults around me were overreacting.
I remember my parents telling me that people would still be talking about the September 11 attacks for years to come. I was skeptical, but of course they turned out to be right, to the point where people often say we are living in the “post 9/11 world” — a world of increased government surveillance and fear of terrorism.
I’m 21 now, so I’ve been living in this “world” for more than half my life. As such, I’ve never known any other kind of world, at least not from an adult perspective. What media pundits have called the “post 9/11 world,” everyone roughly my age and younger has had to accept as just “the world.”
Less than a decade from now, people who weren’t old enough to remember the 9/11 attacks will be old enough to vote. These are people whose beliefs and values have been shaped by the fear prevalent in Western culture over the last 12 years.
Young people are taking for granted levels of surveillance that would have been considered shocking not long ago. There was a time when, upon hearing reports of government agencies spying on private phone data, the typical response would have been to dismiss it as ridiculous and as a conspiracy theory.
People are treating 9/11 as a cultural fixture.
Nowadays, the response is considerably more blasé; people recognize they are being spied on, and respond, “so?” My purpose here is not to collapse into an anti-NSA diatribe, but merely to point out the change that has occurred in our behaviour.
What interests me about the idea of the post 9/11 world, is that it places the repercussions of the attacks at a higher level of historical importance than the attacks themselves. As time goes on, people are treating 9/11, not as a tragic event, but as a cultural fixture of the era in which we live.
I don’t have an objective view of the situation, and it’s possible that I never will, given that I have spent more than half my life in this post 9/11 world. For this reason, we need to give appropriate time to reflect on 9/11’s full implications.
There’s a (mis)quote from Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai who, when asked about the implications of the French Revolution, said “it’s too soon to say” (he was actually talking about the 1968 civil unrest in France, not the 1789 revolution).
Misquote or not, if you were to ask me what the implications of 9/11 were, my answer would have to be the same, the naivete of my 9-year-old self notwithstanding: it’s still too soon to say.
